Free Hospital EMR and EHR Newsletter Want to receive the latest news on EMR, Meaningful Use,
ARRA and Healthcare IT sent straight to your email? Join thousands of healthcare pros who subscribe to Hospital EMR and EHR for FREE!

Email Address:

We never sell or give out your contact information.
We respect our readers' privacy.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

This week I met with one of the digital marketing team at a children’s hospital. We had a great conversation about the hospital website and the way the hospital’s website represented the organization to the patient. Plus, we talked about how patients choose to interact with the hospital through their website. There are a wide variety of patient requests through the website, but one of those requests was a request for their patient record.

It wasn’t really a surprise that this digital marketer didn’t really know the details of what’s required for a patient to make an appropriate medical record request from his hospital. In his defense, he didn’t usually answer the questions, but just created the website that collected the questions. However, it was quite clear that the workflow for any medical records request was to send it to their HIM department and let them figure it out.

Most organization then have their HIM staff play phone tag with the patient to explain how to make a proper records request which will allow them to release the information to the patient. The progressive organizations might send the patient an email. However, many of them will then ask the patient to mail, drop off or fax in the official records request. If this sounds painful, I can assure you that it’s as painful as it sounds.

This illustrates the massive disconnect between creating a great patient experience and most organization’s current records request process. Please note that I’m not blaming the digital team at hospitals for the issue and I’m not blaming the HIM people for this problem. I’m blaming the disconnect between the two organizations because the only way to solve this problem is to have both organizations involved.

The best patient experience would actually be for the patient to go to their patient portal and download their whole record. Maybe we’ll get their one day, but there are hundreds of systems in a hospital where a patient’s data is stored. So, it’s going to take a while for us to reach the point where a patient can self-service their data requests.

Since I’m not holding my breath on this amount of data sharing happening between disparate systems, I’m more interested in making the current processes so it’s a seamless experience for the patient. If you can model a medical records request on paper, then you can do it digitally. To their credit, I’ve seen a few organizations working on this. In fact, their system is part education about records requests and part getting the information that’s needed to fulfill a records request.

It’s time that HIM and a hospital’s digital and tech teams come together to make the process for requesting records a seamless patient experience. And if you think using a fax machine is a seamless experience for patients, then you’re part of the problem.